Cisco VOIP Basics – Installing Cisco Call Manager Express

This is the second part of my Cisco voip basics series. ( Parts 1, 3 & 4 ) Our goal in this series is to setup a working voice gateway that you could use in your home office. The following covers installation of CME 4.1, and the setup of a Cisco 7960 ip phone on the voice gateway.

Prep Work

Before diving into the installation of our call manager, you’re going to want to do some clean up on your flash. ensure you have 25M free and of course, make sure you have a backup copy of your config and IOS. Obviously a quick way to clean up the flash device would be to format it, but be careful to ensure you restore your IOS from backup and issue a write memory before rebooting.

Uploading CME

Place your CME tar file into the path of your TFTP server. The following command will download and extract the CME software into flash.

Once this completes, you can optionally remove any phone files that will not be needed or used on your gateway. These files are stored in flash:/phone/[phone model]/

CME Setup

First thing we need to do is setup the local tftp server on the router. This is done to share the phone load files with your phones as they boot. If you removed any files / directories, you can remove them from the following command from config mode. You will also want to make sure these match what your CMS package comes with.

Next, in order to setup the GUI we need to tell the http server on the router where to find the files. The following command adds the path to the http server so we can access http://[router ip]/ccme.html

Router(config)#ip http server
Router(config)#ip http path flash:gui

And in order to authenticate, we’ll need to add a web administrator account.

Now, before you exit telephony config mode, lets finish up the initial CME configuration. As before, if you removed any phone specific files, remove them from the following config. Entire this is Router(config-telephoney)# mode…

Finalizing Router Setup

Now that we’ve got CME up and running, you need to setup DHCP and you should probably go ahead and set your clock and configure ntpd. I’m not going to walk you through the entire dhcp config, but there is an option you need to add. Option 150, this tells your phones where their tftp server is. In our case, its going to be the IP address for your voip vlan. Here is a very basic example..

Setting up our first Cisco IP Phone

Ok, we’re finally ready to configure out first Cisco IP phone. Go ahead and get the mac address of the bottom of the unit and configure a port on your switch for the vlan (or if you’re not using any of that you can just plug a crossover cable into the front of your router… ). Plug everything in, except the power for the phone. In our example, we’re going to setup this phone with extension 99 for the office line, and extension 66 for our home line. We need to configure each extension as an Ethernet phone directory numbers or ephone-dn.

!
ephone-dn 1
number 88
label Office

Once we have those configured, we can configure our ephone with the mac address from the bottom of your phone and attach our dn's to the buttons on the phone. Here is an example using the 7960.

!
ephone 1
description Home Office
mac-address 0017.94AF.1E62

That it! Go ahead and write this config out to flash, and power your phone up. Once it gets an ip address and downloads its configuration you should have 2 lines marked on your screen and you should be able to start making calls to your FXS ports. My next post is going to cover setting up your FXO lines and outbound dialing, including dial plans and a simple trunk group.

Network engineer currently servicing the enterprise data center market. I started working on networks in the '90s and still feel like that was just a few years ago. Jack of all trades, master of none; I love to learn about everything. Feel free to ask me about photography, woodworking, nhra, watches, or even networking! -- For feedback, please leave a comment on the article in question, and I'll gladly moderate it several weeks later. For everything else including fan mail or death threats, contact me via twitter.